Laying Down The Law

My take, from a board discussing whether believers are under some form of law:

Law is not authority. It is, rather, the one-off connection of man to authority. In our country, we elect people who make laws, which we then obey. So, obedience to the law is, in fact, a submission to the public consensus. The actual authority over us -- our "King"-- is 51% of the votes cast. But as it is impractical to hold a citywide vote every time someone jaywalks, we use law to effectively enforce the authority of the 51%. Law is the indirect application of authority.

The reason believers are not subject to law is that we have no more need of a one-off connection to divine authority. We are in Christ, who is our King. Law is extended to those who are beyond the direct relationship. In this case, those who do not believe. Those of us who are in Christ are ruled directly by Him, not indirectly via law.

It is helpful to me to understand the term "the law of Christ" in the same way as I understand "the law of gravity". "Law" in this construct means an understanding of the essential nature of a thing, rather than rules promulgated. IMO, the law of Christ is not rules promulgated by Christ, but a revelation of His person. Just as the "law of gravity" is a revelation of a part of our physical reality.

Time is Money, Just Maybe

I recently listened to an appeal by two nice young ladies who are doing children's ministry. They were asking for two things: more volunteers, and financial support so they could do this work full time. As a working stiff, I must confess I thought, "You want more time AND more money? That money you are asking for, well, I have to spend time earning it. I can't take Friday off and give you the money I would have earned that day."

I was not offended, for these folks were doing "ministry" the old fashioned way: ask to be hired as a ministry professional and then when you realize a few professionals are not up to the task at hand, ask for more help. Next time, it will be overseas ministry, or ministry to the aged, or to the sick. Send those folks on the rounds to raise support yet again. From the same brothers who had their wallet out last week. It's not the heart of the people that's causing ministry to struggle, it's the methodology.

Today I thought of a possible solution for my friends who are doing brick-and-mortar church ministry like this. What if you asked believers for time in lieu of money? The average Joe out here cannot go to meetings and ask for more money to support his calling as a bus driver or a teacher or social worker. We take our wages and make do. Then church members give a portion of those earnings over to their local group. But if your religion club sees a ministry as important, why not say--
"We'd like you to stop giving cash and give time instead. Instead of giving $100 this week, take a day of your vacation time and come serve soup to the poor for the day. Only put cash in the plate if you can't take a day off work to teach children or take elderly folks to the doctor."

We already do this with our "retired" members. If they can't give, they can drive the Meals On Wheels van. But most of us wage earners just can't do this under our current way of thinking. But value my time like you value my money? That can be very motivating.

Result? If this really takes hold, we get many more volunteers and much less cash flow to the institution. More willing hands, but more money left in their pockets to pay the bills. More work gets done, but the organization will have to pare down. Fewer professionals, more servants. People who can't afford to write a check can actually give more and feel like their contribution is appreciated.

If we are truly longing to see a work get done, this concept will get somebody excited. But if we are trying to make sure that "our church" has a thriving program, it will fall on deaf ears.

New Ad Slogan For Christians

I realize that I post a lot in other places and some of those thoughts need to migrate over to the blog. So, here's something adapted from a recent exchange on a discussion board:

Friend:
"Lord I believe; help my unbelief. The more I learn to love humanity the less I love people.

"These 2 old saying kind of describe where I am. I no longer have any use for the institutional church with all the politics and guilt trips. I am still attending some but I really get nothing from this type of service. I think our family will start meeting at our house and invite folks to join us."

Charles:
I hear you.

Here's a thought to chew on about meeting at home. The whole idea of 'meeting' is pretty foreign to how we live at home. Meetings have agendas and expectations which turn into schedules and liturgy and organizations.

I have been in more home groups and house churches than I can count, and most wound up looking more or less just like Wednesday night services. We repeat what we know, whether we want to or not. It's just like when a man declares, "I'll never be like my father," and thirty years later, voila! He's just like old Dad. (Sorry, Dad. No offense!)

I have a radical suggestion that we change the entire basis for our getting together. Acts 2 says that the disciples devoted themselves to fellowship and eating together (among other good things). What if we started from here, instead of from "the apostle's doctrine"? Come sit at my dining table! We'll eat, and we'll visit. If there is something of the Spirit in us, it will come out. If we need to pray, we'll pray. But instead of tacking on eating and fellowship as "after we dismiss" activities because, let's face it, we did not do them during church services, let's start in a new place instead. And thus my new proposed slogan--

"Dinner! It's what's for church."

cm

Samaritan in Camo

Had a nice experience the other day. Seated next to the window at Starbucks, with a long line at the counter. Suddenly a young soldier (maybe 22-23?) in the line jumped out of the line and sprinted for the front door. My head swiveled as he hit the door and I saw a ragged old man outside on the sidewalk, where he had apparently fallen. From his appearance, he could have been my grandpa or a local wino. But this young man spotted his fall, rushed to his side, insisted on helping him up, and then stood by to make sure he was all right, over the man's protestations. After the man was under his own power and headed on down the sidewalk, the soldier returned to the line as though nothing had happened.

I was impressed by both his rate of response-- no hesitation about losing his place in line, or stopping to see if anyone standing near the man would help first-- and by his quiet insistence on seeing the man safely on his way. (And I'm a little chagrined that he blew past me to get the job done.) Nice work, young man.

A Nation of Sprinters

(RANT WARNING: Readers seeking cool, reasoned spiritual things, please scroll past...)

America is a nation of sprinters. Fast out of the gate, strong at the start, able to bring tremendous assets and effort together in a short time in pursuit of a goal. It’s easy to put this in government terms, so let’s get closer to home. What do we love? What do we celebrate? The hot start-up company gets the ink, not the long-term industry: Gillette makes razor blades and generates money while Yahoo! makes news and generates headlines. We know the rookie of the year, while the career-wins guy is a statistical footnote. We pay $5000 to the rapid weight-loss clinic instead of spending $500 in the produce aisle and $100 on walking shoes. Americans watched the made-for-TV attack on Baghdad with rapt interest, and now with hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground, we have no idea what’s going on. We blasted FEMA for being slow to get to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but that same government has to let every highway bridge and overpass rot because we can’t see why we should have to pony up taxes for them. We complain about our lawmakers doing things we don’t understand while we won’t sit still for more than a 30-second CNN sound bite before reaching for the remote.

Our world view is the short view.

Our national slogan should be, “Hurry! Hurry! What?” In the words of Havner, we “go up like rockets and come down like rocks.”

Welcome to the good ol’ USofADD.

And dear readers, many of you are at this very moment having the same thought: “Well then, tell us what to do about it.” A paragraph of clever rant in print and we are ready to take action. Ready, fire, aim. On that horse and riding off in all directions. We are a nation that has confused response time with positive action. Mistaken activity for accomplishment. And here are three simple steps we can take right now to get back on the right track: (Get real. Did you really not get that joke? It’s our appetite for “three quick steps” to anything that has formed us into a people with the attention span of a fruit fly. Everyone who thought there were going to be three steps, go back to the start of this rant and read it slowly…)

Life is not so simplistic, and it’s time we grew up and faced it. Time that we stopped looking for the quick fix, the short cut, the trite and simple answer to ancient and complex problems. And it’s high time we stopped believing people who offer these things and stopped buying their books. (By the way, next time you are in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble, ask yourself, “Now which of these books is going to dramatically change my life? And for only $17.95?”) Then put it back.

Stop and think. Okay, that’s a simple step, but it’s not the secret panacea to anything. But it might just slow down the our mental hyperdrive long enough for us to realize at least one thing we had failed to consider before. And having done that, we might think a bit more and discover more. And such a radical approach might help us toward solutions instead of mere reactions.

I am a proponent of a new set of heroes. That elderly man-- the one who takes care of his wife who is stricken with Alzheimer’s and can’t remember who he is-- is my hero. That thirty-year veteran second grade teacher is my hero. The kid who threw papers and mowed yards and said “You want fries with that?” until he wanted to puke-- all to buy his cheap first car; he is my hero. That lady who’s been in night school for six years is my hero. That couple who have stayed married for sixty years are my heroes. The man who saved up for five years and bought a new car with cash is my hero. Nobody on this list got there the easy way, or the fast way. They passed on opportunities for easier answers and more comfortable paths. They discovered that what is worthwhile, costs. And they paid the price. And we —not just they— are the richer for it.

What to do, what to do

The interesting thing here is that while the structural problems with today's religion club structure are quite complex, the ways I see to respond are so far fairly simple. Let's start with...

Make friends --real friends-- with believers outside your club. I grew up in a very exclusive religion club where we were not encouraged to do this. When God gave me godly friends outside my group, my whole view on the church changed irrevocably. It's also hard to get trapped inside your club when that would exclude your own BFF.

If you are a member of a club, ask a leader to explain things to you. This may be tricky, because it's probably going to come off as a challenge. So pick a leader of your club who knows you and who won't get offended if you ask pointed questions. Buy lunch. Maybe several. Ask directly why your club does not have a whole lot of meaningful relationships with other local clubs. Ask him how he feels about you splitting your Sunday time up between your club and the clubs of your friends. Don't be sidetracked by minor issues. Ask, and sincerely try to understand, why he thinks your club should exist when there are lots of other clubs in town. See if he has vision beyond the club; you'd be surprised how many leaders do, and are afraid to follow what they see. Encourage him!

If you are not a member of a club, check out your friend's club. Don't join, just look for other believers to be friends with. By the way, there's no need to bang heads about joining, just tell anyone who offers that you are already his brother or sister and that's good enough for you. Small groups are a great way to do this, by the way. It's hard to really meet anyone at Sunday Services, but a club's small group or a class or home group works great. Make friends.

Look for service projects outside your club. Substitute this for a club activity if you have limited time available. Sling hash at a soup kitchen, build a Habitat house, mentor a kid at a Boys Club. The more servant-like and the less visible the job the better. You meet a tremendous grade of people this way. Make friends.

That'll do for a start...

Is “Winning the World for Christ” Killing My Neighbors?

Great institutions have great dreams, or at least great aspirations. The most widely-claimed of these found in the evangelical church is found in the slogan, “Win the world for Christ!”. This is a noble and seemingly-inarguable aspiration. After all, who do we not hope will follow Jesus? For whom has Christ not died? As it is the Father’s express desire that “not any should perish”, should we not all embrace this as our life’s cause?

Well, at the risk of heresy, I’m not so sure.

How does the great task of “winning the world for Christ” actually manifest itself among us? On the positive, it has stirred many of us with a concern for those outside our own cultures, and has sent the message of the gospel into the far corners of the world. I have numerous friends in places like Uganda, Kenya, Morocco, China, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. I have a friend who is a missionary from Nigeria to the U.S. (As much as that may offend some, I see the same desperate needs he sees in our post-Christian culture.) I clearly see the work of the Holy Spirit in these callings.

But I fear the very grandiosity of the language we use has borne unintended consequences. After many years in the church, I do not see today’s believer to be any more likely to bear witness of the life of Christ to his neighbor than was his grandfather. In fact, a strong argument can be made that today’s Joe Christian is less likely to impact the family next door than perhaps ever before in American history.

Our drumbeat of “winning the world” has contributed to what I call the “myopia effect” among the church. Our suburban church loads up a hundred fired-up teens and takes them to a Mexican border town, or to the urban jungle of a large city, all in the interest of ministering to the lost. And they do it with great fervor. But that busload of kids drives right past our own blighted neighborhoods on the way out of town to “spread the gospel”. We can now see so far out “into the world” that our own neighbors have become only vague and fuzzy images to us. While we are able to communicate our thrill in “going into all the world”, we are much less effective at sharing God’s concern for the people who live within our own zip code. I do not think this is intentional neglect so much as romantic overlook. As a veteran missionary once told me, “There’s no magic in a plane ticket.”

When is the last time your congregation was asked for money to support a missionary living in the African interior? That fellow who is on furlough from Africa brought his Powerpoint presentation—it used to be slides, but Microsoft marches on—and everyone enjoyed the exotic photos of strange peoples in strange lands. You wondered at how those people were SO much more receptive to the gospel than are Americans. But when was the last time you considered the same kind of financial support for one living in the barrio in your own city? We get far more excited about unbelievers overseas than unbelievers in our neighborhood.

Our religious traditions are not making it any easier for us to touch the lives of our neighbors. Joe lives across the street from me, and his church home is across town. He saw that fellowship advertised on a billboard, and chose that group from a wide assortment of congregations, based on his compatibility with its doctrines and demographics, and on the attractiveness of its programs and public offerings. As Joe’s neighbors, we know that Joe loads up the family on Sunday and “goes to church”, and he has a fish on the back of his car, so we figure he’s a Christian, but we don’t know a lot more. Joe’s family is heavily involved in church activities, which are constantly expanding in an effort to grow the size of that fellowship. As a result, there is created a natural division of activity—the religious stuff, the “God stuff” happens across town, while the mundane everyday stuff happens here. There, Joe worships. There, he expresses his devotion to God and talks about it with others. Over here, he mows his lawn and takes his kid to Little League. We know if Joe has crabgrass, but we don’t see much of his Christian walk.

Joe is not intentionally neglecting his neighbors. But the epicenter of his “Christian life” is far from his neighborhood, and what happens here is a faint echo of what happens there. And so long as his local religion club maintains the steady call to “come to church” and “come with us and do good things”, this dynamic will continue.

The solution is simple, but counter-intuitive for most professional clergy and folks interested in “building our church”. Tell people to go home. Yep. Start carving out parts of the week when no “church activities” will be scheduled. Rather than recruiting and training people to teach Sunday school, teach them how to love their neighbors. Truly loving one’s neighbor is the most effective way of bringing people to Jesus. Most believers in my experience testify that they came to Christ mainly because of the actions of some non-clergy individual who loved them.

Now for the warning: this suggestion is much more radical than it seems, and far harder than I make it out to be. For I am suggesting that a local religion club begin to do things that are not consistent with the future of the club. That they choose against the club’s best interest to sow believers into the community. I am suggesting that they begin to seek for their members to identify less with First Church and more with Jesus, to serve their neighbors even if the club’s programs languish. This is a hard enough sell in and of itself. But in our competitive religious marketplace, the inevitable reaction will be for the religion club next door to quickly redouble its recruiting efforts, with the distinct possibility that once Religion Club A sends its members out into the community, Religion Club B will scoop up half of them and entice them into the building down the street for the hot new version of American Churchgoing’s Greatest Hits. Clergymen seem to know this reality almost instinctively and find it nearly impossible to embrace the kind of change that would put “their flock” at risk of changing membership to the club next door.

So with these obstacles in mind, what can we do to help this along?

More to come…